UN in Nairobi asked to ‘kick the habit’ – again!

One of the sweetest surprises of the Blog Action Day 09 – Climate Change, was a post by Sukuma Kenya. As you already know, we have been ‘collaborating’ with this passionate Kenyan to try and end the show of opulence and total disregard for climate change – with the vehicles they drive – among UN employees in the Nairobi office.

Did UNEP staffers drive such a car on #BAD09?

Although I get carried away by wildlife conservation matters and tend to wander away from this ‘campaign’ to end ‘environmental impunity’ at the offices that house the global headquarters of the United Nations Environmental Programme, Sukuma Kenya doesn’t.

I was thus pleasantly surprised when he informed me that he had chosen to address the ‘Kick the Habit‘ campaign in his Blog Action Day 2009. Never mind the post was on 16th not 15th October, which is the official Blog Action Day, the post was simple but very powerful.

You might want to read it yourself…So UNEP, did you Kick The Habit (Just for today)?

The Elusive Humvee Shows Up Again – In a ‘Green’ Place

For months now, the blogosphere, represented by the likes of Sukuma Kenya, have been hunting for one elusive beast: the banana yellow fuel guzzling Humvee with UN plates in Nairobi. This polluter of choice for one UN staffer has been accused of being an insult to the UN’s attempt at being carbon neutral and it’s actions on curbing climate change.

Well, guess what? The Humvee showed up. Not in a dingy nightclub or some dimly lit back road, but in one of the primary ‘green’ places in Nairobi: the Nairobi National Park - at the parking lot. By coincidence, I was there, with a good camera. That is why I am able to present this magnificent picture of one of the rarest and most elusive species of beast in Kenya.

*Note: no attempt made to blur the registration number plates – that would be redundant.

The banana yellow Humvee shows up again

What the Humvee was doing in the one spot that makes Nairobi qualify to be called a ‘green’ city – and perhaps why the UN Environmental Programme has it’s headquarters in this city – is indeed puzzling. Did the seeming flamboyant owner suddenly realize that he cared about the environment? No doubt an oxymoron. Was it just another opportunity to show off his behemoth? Well, we’ll probably never know.

Whatever happens, the blogosphere can now feast their eyes on this beast and continue to ask themselves ‘will the UN Nairobi office ever change their ways?‘ ‘Will they ever practice what they preach?’ One thing is for sure though; the blogosphere will continue to try and bring them to their senses. Whether they’ll ever succeed or not is open for debate. Afterall, the eagles once sang:

And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast

-The Eagles: Hotel California

The Saga of Nairobi’s UN Fuel Guzlers

The bad guys

Sukuma Kenya knows how to kick up a campaign. He’s unrelenting in his quest for an environmentally, and carbon neutral UN office in Nairobi. If you don’t already know, Nairobi is where the global headquarters of the global United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is located.

Sukuma Kenya and others in the blogosphere are totally appalled by the largess with which the UN staffers in the UN office complex at Gigiri, Nairobi move around town. Sukuma and the said others apparently get migraines whenever they see the colossal 5-liter engine fuel guzzlers that most of the UN people drive around, garnished with their red diplomatic plates, clearly separating them from the regular Kenyan motorist in his 1400cc Toyota Corolla.

These behemoths of locomotion have galled Sukuma for ages and he’s made personal the quest to make the UN people ‘Kick the Habit‘ . No wonder – or not – Sukuma’s blog is now banned at the UN complex in Gigiri. In short, inside of the sprawling complex, you cannot access the blog. And here I was thinking that the freedom of speech is one of the fundamental freedoms that the UN stands for.

He’s been alerted by a friend that his blog is no longer wanted in Gigiri. What followed that is is not particularly clear but he’s now received somewhat official communication confirming that his blog is actually banned. Now the Media Department at UN-Gigiri has informed the IT Department to unlock that blog. Someone should check on that.

This is totally unconfirmed and is not an accusation, but I have had it mentioned that the newest – and most obscene – entry into the fuel guzzlers’ stable at UN office, the banana-yellow Humvee , belongs to a staffer in the IT Department.

The good guys

Perhaps it is Sukuma’s campaign or it is just that there are genuine environmentalists in the UNEP. I saw a Toyota Hybrid Prius the other day with UNEP plates. I couldnt have been happier. Here is the picture.

A much 'greener' car

It seems that not all the people at UN want to drive around in ‘planet-killers’.

Oh no! We’re all gonna die!

If your regular skeptics would read the WWF’s Living Planted Report, they would call it a doomsday conspiracy theory. They would say that the alarmist – the tree hugging scum who want us to live in the stone age – are, as usual, trying to scare us from accumulating wealth and living like space gods.

The 2008 Living Planet Report was announced today, 29 October 2008, via a press release contained here. It says, in more words than these, that by 2030, we’ll need two planets in order to continue living the way we do. Reason being that we are consuming more natural resources than the planet can produce. Demand has outstripped supply. We already need a third more of the planet to continue living.

Hectares worth of resources consumed by each country (linked from BBC)

The people (i am deliberately avoiding the use of the word “scientists” because the skeptic hates scientists) who came up with this proposition say that some nations already owe the planet a lot. Not surprisingly, the US, China and India are the biggest debtors of the planet.

In the US for instance, each person needs about two times more natural resources than the US has. In fact if the entire population of the earth was to adapt the US’s consumption pattern, we would need 4.5 planets to barely make it to the next day. Maybe the consumption in the US is not the problem. The problem could be that the rest of the world wants to live the American lifestyle instead of convincing the average American of the wisdom of living like a bushman.

Look around. African youth dress like their American counterparts and rap like them, imitate their hand signs and – painfully – curse like them. The most annoying thing is that the African youth are – in the most part – a cheap imitation of the Americans. But that is another story altogether.

In Kenya, we all dream of owning fuel guzzler Hummers – even our Prime Minister has one. Recently, one UN employee acquired the military specification Humvee and there was immediate outcry from the “ethical” online people. Again, the skeptics would have slammed the ethical people with something in the general direction of “a man cant just buy a Humvee and enjoy the attention, just because you think there is global warming?” or “If i can afford to buy, fuel, and service a Humvee, why not?” or simply “killjoys!”

The Humvee that is causing sensation in Nairobi (from Nick Wadhams Blog)

The BBC summarizes this tragedy by saying that three quarters of the human population now lives in countries where consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal. The BBC calls these nations “ecological debtors” who are drawing and overdrawing from the natural coffers of agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them.

In a nutshell, with current consumption rates, each living person on earth needs an average 2.7 hectares of productive land to sustain his lifestyle. If we divide the total human population by the amount of land available it appears that only 2.1 hectares are available per person. This means that the earth has exceeded its human carrying capacity already.

To me, that is not the thing that the skeptics should worry about. They should instead consider that the situation is deteriorating faster than expected. In 2006, the WWF team had predicted that the two-planet syndrome would strike in 2050. Now they had to hack off a whole two decades from their prediction. That doesn’t say they are incorrect, it just says that we never learn.

So what are the solutions?

let me just quote the WWF press release:

The report suggests some key “sustainability wedges” which if combined could stabilize and reverse the worsening slide into ecological debt and enduring damage to global support systems. For the single most important challenge – climate change – the report shows that a range of efficiency, renewable and low emissions “wedges” could meet projected energy demands to 2050 with reductions in carbon emissions of 60 to 80 per cent.

If humanity has the will, it has the ways to live within the means of the planet, but we must recognize that the ecological credit crunch will require even bolder action than that now being mustered for the financial crisis

I must add that a solution also lies in how many children we choose to bring into this planet. Population growth is the problem really. There is simply too many of us such that the earth is groaning under our weight. We are eating ourselves out of existence. But maybe that is a good thing. With humans out of the way, the planet can return to sustainable existence. Problem is, humans wont go down alone; they’ll take the planet with them.